Land of big numbers: stories, paperback/te-ping chen

Dazzling.

Riveting.

-- New York Times Book Review Chen has one of the years big debut books.

-- Philadelphia Inquirer Gripping and illuminating .

At the heart of Te-Ping Chen s remarkable debut lies a question all too relevant in 21st Century America: What is freedom? -- Jennifer Egan Immensely rewarding, from the first sentence to the last .

An exceptional collection.

--Charles Yu A stirring and brilliant debut story collection, offering vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora, both love letter and sharp social criticism, from a phenomenal new literary talent bringing great insight from her years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal ( Elle ).

Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled--messily, violently, but still beautifully--into the present.

Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chens stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited.

Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist.

A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend.

A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of Chinas volatile stock exchange.

And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.

With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.

About author(s): TE-PING CHENs fiction has been published in, or is forthcoming from, The New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Tin House , and The Atlantic .

A reporter with the Wall Street Journal , she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong.

Prior to joining the Journal in 2012, she spent a year in China as a Fulbright fellow.

She lives in Philadelphia.